TRADING MY CHEATING HUSBAND FOR THE LYCAN KING novel Chapter 245

CHAPTER 177: CHOOSE TO STAY

KNOX’S POV

My jaw locks so tight something in my temple pops and my eyes burn with a heat that has nowhere to go

because I haven’t cried since I was a child in this hallway and I’m not going to start now.

I’m NOT, I refuse to give this house the satisfaction of-

Choose to stay

She couldn’t. She wrote the words and she couldn’t follow them.

She told me to stay whole and she broke herself instead, and I’ve spent my entire life proving that the apple doesn’t fall far from the tree because what did I do this morning?

What did I do when the pain got bad enough, when Ember’s words hit the places that were already bleeding, when the room closed in and the only options were stay and feel it or run and numb it?

I ran. I said “wouldn’t think of it” and I walked out and I flew to Switzerland.

I left her standing in the snow screaming my name, and my mother is asking me from beyond the grave to do the one thing she couldn’t do and the one thing I have never once in my life been able to do, which is

STAY.

I stayed for Rayana and she left me at an altar. I stayed for Celeste and she fucked my best friend. I stayed for Nathaniel and he drugged me and documented me and lied to my face for a decade.

Every time I stay, the staying destroys me.

Every time I love, the love turns feral and eats everyone in the room. My mother loved, and that loved

bound her to a marriage that killed her. That took her away from me.

And yet…

す

Yet she wants me to love hard and stay whole.

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And I don’t know how to do EITHER of those things because the man who was supposed to teach me beat the lesson into my bones with his fists and his claws.

And the woman who was supposed to show me how left a letter and locked a door and the sound of that lock is the last sound I heard from her, and it echoes in every room of this house and in every room of my

life and I can’t-

I can’t breathe.

The hallway is shrinking. Phantom is groaning in pain. And the walls are pressing inward and the ceiling is descending and the air is thickening into something solid that won’t enter my lungs no matter how hard I try to inhale.

My hands are shaking and my vision is tunnelling and this has happened before, this exact collapse, this

exact position. back against this exact wall

The last time I was eight years old and my father found me and picked me up and held me against his

chest and said “breathe with me, my clever boy, match my breathing.”

And I could feel his heart under my ear, steady and strong, the heart of the man between episodes, the

father who loved me in the spaces where the beast allowed it.

My back slides down the wall. My knees hit the floor.

The letter crumples against my chest and I am kneeling in the hallway of my dead parents‘ house having a panic attack at thirty–seven years old in the same spot where I had them at eight, and nothing has changed, nothing has ever changed, the house is the same and the hallway is the same and the boy is the same – just bigger now and uglier and meaner and carrying more bodies.

I don’t know how long I’m on that floor. Time stops working the way it’s supposed to and the hallway stretches and contracts and somewhere in the distance I hear a door open and footsteps and a voice saying my name, and the voice is female and the hands that touch my shoulders are gentle and my broken mind does what broken minds do – it fills in the gaps with what it needs most.

“Ember.” The name comes out of me with desperation, like a prayer and a wound at the same time, and I’m pulling her toward me, pulling her down, pressing my face into her neck and holding on with the desperate grip of a man who’s been drowning for twelve hours and has finally found something solid.” Please. I’m sorry. I’m so sorry. Please don’t leave. I’ll take everything you have to give – if you hate me, I don’t care, hate me, scream at me, tear me apart, just please don’t leave. I should never have left. I should never have said those things. Please – please don’t-”

The hands on my shoulders go rigid. Then they push–gently, firmly, creating distance I don’t want and

can’t stop.

“It’s me, Knox.” Rayana’s voice filters in, sad and quiet. “It’s Rayana. Not Ember.”

The name hits like cold water.

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